Books In Review

What Comes Next

New Paradigms for Old

What Comes Next. By James P. Pinkerton. Hyperion.
404 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed by John S. Gardner

Full Disclosure: I have known Jim Pinkerton as friend and colleague for
eight years. Throughout that time, we have carried on an intellectual
conversation about Burkean conservatism, libertarianism, and public
policy.

Pinkerton served as Deputy Assistant for Policy Planning to President
Bush and has worked in four presidential campaigns, but this is by no
means a Washington "inside baseball" book, still less a kiss-and-tell
memoir of the failings of three administrations. It is only secondarily
a book about policies and primarily a book about philosophies-about the
kinds of choices people and societies make about social organization
that in turn influence the kinds of policies societies adopt.

Pinkerton's basic thesis is that the "Old Paradigm" of bureaucracy and
bureaucratic control, dating from Bismarck but with far more ancient
antecedents, will be replaced by a "New Paradigm" based on markets,
personal freedom, and personal choice. From his reading of Thomas Kuhn's
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1964), Pinkerton realized that
American politics is currently in the midst of a paradigm shift, an
intellectual revolution in the political sphere as profound as
Copernicus' in astronomy, and that winning political leaders will adapt
to the new realities of market-oriented control. Using a broad and witty
analogy to computing, Pinkerton describes how the "Bureaucratic
Operating System" has been upgraded over the centuries, refined in its
transplantation to America, and is now being outmoded.

Yet why does this book deserve to be reviewed in a journal of religion
and public life?

First, many issues Pinkerton addresses-school choice, health care,
changing employment patterns, the effect of computers on society-demand
serious study by religiously committed Americans. This need is all the
more urgent when the "Cyber Future" that Pinkerton describes as the
alternative to the New Paradigm is so frightening: "canon-cracking, the
end of the shared values that humanity has accumulated over the
centuries." He suggests that one plausible scenario in continuing along
the Old Paradigm path is a polity rent along the fault lines of income
and technological literacy, an atomistic, cold society in which
"cyberpunk capitalism no longer needs ethics-because the gimlet gaze of
technology makes up for it."

More broadly, Pinkerton defines a paradigm as "a two-dollar word for the
pattern of thinking around which human beings center their vision of
reality." Does this, or any other, new paradigm contain a role for
religion? Does it reflect the fact that millions of Americans center
their vision of reality-their paradigm-on God, looking not merely to
earthly cities but to the heavenly city as well?

Refreshingly, Pinkerton rejects the intolerance of the "tolerant" that
all too frequently manifests itself in contempt for religion. This is
more the libertarianism of Vaclav Havel than of Jerry Garcia. The work
breathes a humane spirit and a muckraking reformer's earnest zeal for
those whom the Old Paradigm has failed, none more so than the
inhabitants of the inner cities. Rare among Republicans, Pinkerton has a
deep understanding of precisely how the poor are affected by a changing
economy, as in privatized "Edge Cities" where the affluent buy personal
safety and efficient services while the poor are left with Old Paradigm
bureaucracy.

The principles behind the New Paradigm are essentially libertarian.
Pinkerton generally favors a libertarian, market-oriented approach based
on the principle of personal choice to both economic and social policy-
school choice in education, vouchers and Medical Savings Accounts in
health care, and (notably) gay marriage (which he unconvincingly defends
as a conservative reform), all combining in the New Paradigm of "an
upwardly spiralling fusion of radical conservative dialectic."

Somewhat surprisingly, though, Pinkerton also understands the need to
reinforce a sense of community in American life, both in terms of
strengthening individual communities and strengthening the American
community as a whole-though he frankly concedes the difficulty of
restoring community in a world of the Internet and cocooning.

As Pinkerton describes it, religion and religious Americans have nothing
to fear from a New Paradigm America. They would be truly left alone to
work out their own salvation, and the hand of the state would not
interfere in their choices. Choice in education would permit parents to
educate their children as they see fit, and no one would have the right
to silence religious voices in the public square.

This is not the ideal of a Ralph Reed or Daniel Lapin, but it is not
unfriendly towards religion; indeed, religion and religious institutions
have a vital role to play in filling the needs unmet by the bureaucratic
paradigm. Pinkerton highlights how the Old Paradigm has spiritually
impoverished people by quenching hopes and dreams and leaving them
stultified under bureaucratic control.

The book offers much common ground for discussion if not always for
agreement. A new focus on personal security and expanded federalism and
privatization appeals to an age when it is difficult to imagine that the
welfare system could be run worse by the States. Pinkerton provides an
excellent analysis of the judicial system's effect on public
administration and decries "Vealocracy," the semi-privatized special
interest politics that drives so much of Federal spending and
decisionmaking. He enthusiastically supports the need to form as broad a
political coalition as possible, observing the necessity of pushing
areas of agreement such as "personal security" and "personal
responsibility" to the top of the agenda of political concerns, and
divisive issues like abortion and gay rights to the bottom.

But one need not be an Old Paradigm cynic to see something unrealistic
in this view of politics. It is difficult to see how a modern
conservative leader could maintain political peace in the way that
Franklin Roosevelt kept both labor unions and segregationists in the
same coalition. No group willingly puts itself and its issues at the
bottom of the agenda-especially groups that believe themselves to be
marginalized in public discourse such as gays (or for that matter,
evangelicals). Political issues do not resolve themselves so easily.
Either gay marriage is legal or it is not. The law simply cannot respect
both views of fundamental personal belief.

Yet even if Pinkerton's vision of a new politics is not entirely
persuasive, he does convincingly argue that our current stalemate-a
libertarian social ethos and statist political ethos-is fundamentally
unstable. It may be impossible to return to a Victorian ideal of sharply
limited government. But it is worth studying the transition between
classical liberalism and Old Paradigm liberalism. In studying the
history of that transition-and specifically in asking whether that
transition can be reversed-one may discover whether the New Paradigm
really is "what comes next."

In any event, Pinkerton has written an important book. It is welcome for
a libertarian to acknowledge the dangers of capitalism without ethics
and to point the way to a capitalism based on real empowerment of the
individual, opening economic opportunities in all sectors of society.
Rightly or wrongly, the libertarian case is increasingly prominent in
American political discourse, and it is nowhere better or more
generously stated than here. Whether they rejoice or tremble at the
prospect of the New Paradigm, those who wish to undertand American
society must understand Pinkerton's argument.

John S. Gardner served as Special Assistant to the President and
Assistant Staff Secretary for President Bush. He presently resides in
New York City